


East of the Sun, West of the Moon

by Lady_Spindle



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Adventure, Curses, East of the Sun and West of the Moon Elements, Falling In Love, Fluff, Huldra, Ice-Skating, M/M, Magic, Magic castles, Not beta'd we die like men, Prince Victor Nikiforov, Yuuri is a BAMF, Yôkai, slow-burn, very loose historical accuracy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21805555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Spindle/pseuds/Lady_Spindle
Summary: As the Katsuki family's humble onsen falls onto hard times, an unexpected guest arrives at their front gate - a blue-eyed white bear with a single request: send their youngest, Yuuri, with him in exchange for riches and prosperity.Against their wishes, Yuuri accompanies the white bear to an enchanted castle. There he finds more than he could ever ask for, and soon must discover how far he is willing to go to protect it.[Loosely based off of the Norwegian fairy-tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon]
Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov
Comments: 5
Kudos: 40
Collections: Holidays!!! on Ice (2019)





	1. Cover Image

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Myshellebelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myshellebelle/gifts).



> So thanks to my favorite person in the world[ Myshellebelle ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myshellebelle) I'm gonna try to make this a whole thing after clinging to a rough outline of this AU for like three years. 
> 
> Originally a series of illustrations for the 2019 YOI Holiday Gift Exchange, now featuring the fic to accompany it. [the second has been removed for now, because it is technically the ending scene]
> 
> Hope you enjoy!


	2. Part 1.1: The White Bear

Once upon a time there lived a poor onsen-keeper and his family. Although their hometown Hatsetsu had once been a prosperous village, bustling with visitors, the villagers had fallen on difficult times. Soon, even the onsen was in danger of closing. 

The onsen-keeper, Toshiya Katsuki, feared what would become of his wife and two children until one day a most unusual visitor arrived at their front gates. 

Peering through the metal bars of the gate is not a long awaited customer, but an enormous bear. In the rising moonlight, the creature’s pale fur shimmers silver, offset by strangely blue eyes. 

The appearance of a white bear was unusual in Hatsetsu, causing Toshiya to fear it must be mad, or desperately starving. He weighed his options, perhaps the beast would lose interest and leave, or perhaps he should take his son Yuuri and try to gather a group from the town to scare it off. 

Armed with brooms and kitchen knives, the family of four crept out to investigate the bear, sitting tranquil at their front gate. When the light of their lanterns did not frighten the creature, they prepared to scare it off. 

Until it spoke. 

_“Good evening to you,”_ its voice was deep and eerie, not in their native language but somehow intelligible. 

“The same to you,” Toshiya replies, by reflex, the whole situation too strange to be questioned in the moment. 

_“I have come to your family in its time of need. If you give me your youngest child, you will become as rich as you are now poor,”_ the bear speaks. 

Yuuri is the youngest. He feels his stomach drop as four sets of eyes turn to him, three human, and one ursine. Words stick in his throat, because his answer should be an instant denial, but no sound makes its way past his lips. 

“You can’t ask us this!” Yuuri’s mother, Hiroko cries, planting herself between Yuuri and the bear. 

To his right, his sister Mari tenses with the broom she wields. 

The bear’s head drops, eyes trained to the ground. _“You have until tomorrow morning to decide. Then, I will leave you.”_

It speaks no more, and lies down in front of the gate, back towards the onsen. 

The family retreats back inside, reeling. Their family friend, Minako waits for them, instructed to tend the cooking rice while they dealt with the bear. 

“What do you mean it _spoke_?” She shouts, already too deep into a bottle of poor-quality sake. 

“We all heard it,” Toshiya shakes his head, “it asked for Yuuri in exchange for prosperity for our family.”

“That’s ridiculous! It’s clearly a trap!” Minako continues her tirade, “or worse, it’s one of those _yokai_ the people of the north call _huldra_.”

“You really believe in fairytales of ice trolls?” Mari says dryly. She side eyes her brother, completely silent since the white bear spoke. 

Yuuri picks at his bowl of rice, it is all the food the family can afford, and even so their supply is running low, uncertain if it will survive the approaching winter. He’s still overwhelmed by the appearance of the bear, a talking bear, a talking bear that wanted _him_.

It’s clearly the work of magic. Why would a magic bear want anything to do with him? The simple son of an onsen-keeper?

Around him, his family has already made the decision: he will not - cannot - go with the white bear. 

_You will become rich as you are now poor_. 

Nothing about the bear had been threatening or malicious, despite Minako’s superstition of the _huldra_. Its blue eyes had been sad, even lonely, as it curled up, facing away from the onsen. 

He helped his mother clean up the dishes after the family finished their meager meal. She pulls him aside and hugs him. 

“It’s not fair to ask for your life in exchange for everyone else’s happiness,” she smiles at him, “we could never be truly happy unless you were here with us.”

Yuuri nods and she releases him. 

By the time he reaches his room, he has already started throwing his few possessions into a knapsack. He has made up his mind. 

When the night is deep, Yuuri climbs down from the balcony outside his room, shuffles across the roof of the indoor hot-spring, and lands quietly in the long grasses behind the building. He tosses his knapsack over the back wall and is in the process of trying to get a leg up when Mari catches him. 

“Thought you might be out here,” she observes, taking a drag from her pipe. Tobacco has been terribly expensive, leading her to have to stretch it with foul-smelling leaves and grasses. She only smokes these days when she’s nervous. 

He yelps and falls back to the ground. 

Dusting himself off, he hops back to his feet. “I’ve made up my mind. Please don’t try to stop me.” He’s always been the meeker sibling, and Mari is older. She could overpower him, or call for their parents. 

“Why?” She asks. It’s honest. “No one expects you to sacrifice yourself like this. We’ve been through hard times before, we’ll do it again.”

Yuuri shakes his head, “not like this. How can I stay, when all I have to do is go and everyone else can be happy?”

“You don’t even know what the bear wants!” She hisses, “maybe, it’s just a meal! And how can a _bear_ bring us riches?”

“It’s a talking bear,” Yuuri counters, “probably magical. With me gone, there will be one less mouth to feed.”

Mari makes a frustrated sound as Yuuri continues. 

“I _want_ to go,” his voice turns quiet, “I don’t know what it is but I trust the white bear. If I don’t go now, I may never leave this place.”

“You did always want to travel, see marvelous places,” she concedes. She taps out the ashes of her pipe, suddenly smaller. “What am I supposed to tell mom?”

“Nothing? That it was my choice?” Yuuri shrugs, “your decision.”

Mari nods, then hugs him. 

“I’m going to miss you,” she says, muffled in Yuuri’s coat.

“Me too.”

She gives him a leg up to climb over the wall. Yuuri gathers his rucksack on the other side, shouldering it and pretending that he didn’t see her crying. 

The white bear is exactly where it lay earlier in the evening. 

“Hello?” Yuuri calls, a few yards away in case he needs to run.

_“Yuuri?”_ the bear lifts its head, voice giving a peculiar roll to the “r”. Its eyes are brighter now, almost eerie in the dark. 

“I’ve,” he hesitates, heart pounding. _He’s going to do this_. “I’m coming with you.”

Slowly, as though to appear non-threatening, the bear rises to its feet and takes measured steps towards Yuuri, stopping mere inches away from him. The creature’s gaze is intense, it’s nearly as tall as Yuuri at the shoulder. 

_“Are you afraid?”_

_Yes._ “No, I am not afraid,” he shifts on his feet, trying to keep his breath even. 

The bear seems pleased with his answer, ears perked up and eyes brighter, in contrast to its dejected posture before.

“My family will survive?” he asks, in need of reassurance. 

_“They will flourish,”_ the bear affirms, kneeling on one front leg. 

Yuuri nods, satisfied, and climbs on its back.

The white bear moves soundlessly through the forest, instinctively keeping Yuuri safe from hanging branches and thorny brush. Yuuri lies close against the bear, hands fisted in its thick fur. If his clinging causes any discomfort, the bear makes no indication. 

Some magic must be at play, because all too soon the familiar hills and forests of Yuuri’s home region fall away to small scrubby plants, and finally to snow. The white bear is swift across this new landscape, and though the temperature must have plummeted, Yuuri does not feel the chill. 

“Where are we going?” He calls out, but his voice is torn away from him in the icy air. 

After what feels to be a few hours more, the white bear halts, allowing Yuuri to dismount. Away from the bear, he begins to feel the breath-stealing cold. He pulls his extra clothing: a hat, scarf, gloves, and second coat, from his rucksack to bundle up. The bear stays close to him always, radiating a soothing bubble of heat. 

Yuuri peers ahead. They have surely reached the edge of the world. A vast, unyielding ocean stretches out before them, waves dark and high, capped with angry foaming crests. 

“We’re going to cross it?” He asks the bear, hoping that he’s wrong. 

_“Yes. There is a castle on the other side of the sea. It will be your new home,”_ it rumbles. 

“I see,” Yuuri feels a little weak in the knees. 

The white bear goes down on one knee again, signaling Yuuri their brief rest was over. 

Yuuri scrambles aboard and holds on tightly, not sure how the bear plans to cross the sea until a narrow ice bridge comes into view. He swallows hard. Better than being dragged through the ocean, but only barely. 

“Do you have a name?” Yuuri asks out of the blue, because if he is going to trust the bear to bring them both safely across the sea on a precarious bridge, he would like to know. 

The white bear breaks into a run across the ice without answering. 

_Maybe when we reach the castle,_ Yuuri thinks, burying his face into the white bear’s fur, trying to think of anything but how easy it would be for him to be flung into the icy water and die. 

He has no concept of the passage of time until the roar of waves recedes around him. Realistically, it should have taken days to get this far, he should have needed to sleep or eat. While he is tired, it’s more of a pleasant sleepiness. The white bear continues tirelessly, bounding now up a mountain side. Lifting his head, Yuuri can see in the distance hard geometric forms jutting from the face of the rock itself, too perfect to naturally be a part of the mountain. The white bear slows from a lope to a purposeful walk, rounding the last curve of the rocky path. Yuuri gasps, taking in the full splendor of the castle, bigger than even the largest building in Hatsetsu. 

They enter a small, nearly hidden door under the shadow of some of the architecture. When it seals behind them, Yuuri’s excitement is slightly dampened by the thought that he might never see it open again. 

The warmly lit narthex draws his attention away from clawing thoughts. Like the white bear, the castle too must be enchanted. His family of four, and sometimes Minako, were barely enough to keep their modestly sized onsen running, Yuuri can’t imagine the size of staff a normal castle would need to be maintained. 

Yuuri slides off the white bear, instinctively removing his snow-boots. The carpet beneath his stocking feet is plush, the floor itself radiating a pleasant heat. 

The bear looks at him expectantly and ambles towards the left of two doors leading deeper into the castle. The architecture opens up into a magnificent dining room, furnished with a long wooden table with a mere two chairs, one at each end. A fireplace that nearly took up the entire wall lit instantly when they entered, as well as a smattering of ornate oil lamps around the perimeter, high above Yuuri’s head. The walls were lined with intricately woven tapestries in a patterned style he was unfamiliar with. Hanging above everything was a truly incredible chandelier, reflecting the brilliant light of innumerable crystals dangling from its arching arms. 

_A little bit like an octopus,_ Yuuri muses. 

The white bear snorts, interrupting his wide-eyed assessment of the room. 

_“You may go wherever you please in this castle,”_ it began, “ _this table will always provide you food when you are hungry. But know this: at night the lights of the castle will go out and there is no power you possess to relight them. The lights will lead you here,”_ the white bear sits beside one of the doors on the left side of the room, closer to the back wall, “ _at the top of this tower, you will find your sleeping quarters. Go there, every night, and all will be well.”_

The last part of the bear’s statement feels mildly ominous, but it is just one rule, right? Yuuri can manage one simple rule in exchange for all this lavish comfort. So he tells himself. He begins to peel off his excess layers, noting with interest how the internal temperature of the castle seems to adjust itself to suit his comfort. He hopes the same applies to the whtie bear; it can’t be comfortable being inside under all that heavy fur. 

The bear in question, whilst he was distracted, had begun to pad away, through a different door. 

“Wait!” Yuuri calls out, almost tripping over his own feet, “where are you going? Who-” he stops mid-sentence as the bear disappears through the doorway. _Don’t leave me alone._

Yuuri tries to ground himself, already feeling shaky. He takes a seat at the table, rationalizing that, of course the bear had to leave, he’d just run an impossible distance and needed to rest. He would come back, he had to. 

In the time it takes Yuuri to press back against the wave of nausea hooking itself into his skin, inside and out, a plate of steaming pastries has appeared before him, alongside two glasses of clear liquid. 

Hesitantly, he picks up one of the pastries, its crust is a perfect, flaky, gold consistency. Taking a bite, he’s met with a strange combination of flavors he has never tasted before. Something melty and mealy combined with potato and unusual, earthy spices. It’s foreign, but so so comforting. He eats through two and a half before reaching for the glasses. One smells of nothing and turns out to be water. He downs the glass, and watches with a mixture of fascination and slight terror as it refills itself. Before drinking more, he smells the other glass’s contents. It has the sharp, alcoholic tang of sake so he takes a drink - gagging instantly when the liquor is horribly sharper and stronger than any sake. He finishes the pastry and downs two more glasses of water to wash away the taste of the mystery liquor. 

All the lights are still on and shining bright, so reasonably he still has time before he needs to go to his room. Yet, exhaustion drags at his limbs, making him feel as though he weighs twice as much as usual. Whatever spell had allowed the white bear to run for days on end, and kept Yuuri awake and protected him from cold and hunger must be fading. 

So he goes through the door at the back of the room, and trudges up a long spiral staircase until he reaches a single suite at the top. The suite is divided into a simple water closet, though Yuuri is perplexed to consider what sort of piping would be needed to remove any waste. Yet another facet of living in the castle that could be written off with magic. His main bedroom consisted of a large, four-poster bed with snow white covers and silk sheets. The curtains were fringed with gold, and every part of the room seemed to be accented with silver and gold. A pale wooden closet sat in one corner, which Yuuri explored with great interest. Inside hung a variety of clothes, in a style foreign to him. He searches through until he finds a long tunic, soft and warm, to serve as bedclothes. He folds his own clothing up and places it all in the rucksack, it looks shabby and out of place beside all the finery but he keeps it anyways. 

The clothing fits him perfectly, which is unnerving, as though the castle somehow lives and breathes and knows how to mold itself exactly to him. Yuuri has spent a lifetime surrounded by stories of _yokai_ ; he knows to respect spirits and not interfere in their workings. 

The white bear doesn’t feel like a spirit. Sometimes, when Yuuri looked into its eyes, it seemed almost...human. 

He crawls into the bed, finding it to be the most comfortable thing he’s ever laid upon. In moments, he falls into a deep sleep. 

So deep is his slumber that he doesn’t notice the bed dip as another being joins him in sleep, nor is he conscious when the silver-haired man leaves before dawn, placing a heavy fur pelt over his shoulders, and becoming the white bear once more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The castle is probably in Siberia (for geographical closeness to Japan) and is loosely based off of this [ castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predjama_Castle) though I randomly generated a floor-plan using this [ hella cool procgen program ](https://watabou.itch.io/procgen-mansion)
> 
> The time period is roughly the mid 1800s when the original fairy-tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon was first published, though I am not doing extensive research so anything off can be chalked up to the story being set in a magical fairy-tale universe. 
> 
> The magical feast table gives Yuuri potato-cheese piroshki, and the nasty liquor is plain vodka. Ack. 
> 
> Here is the original [ fairy-tale ](https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/norway034.html) [tho, spoilers much?]


	3. Part 1.2: The White Bear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yuuri adjusts to life in the fantastic castle, but though his new life is comfortable, it is monotonous and lonely, and few things are exactly as they seem.

Yuuri spends the next few days discovering the layout of the castle. Above the dining hall is a room of weaving tools, threads and fabrics. Adjacent is an enormous library with books from all over the world. Yuuri has found a few in Japanese, but mostly he can just enjoy looking at pictures. Adjoining the library, in the room directly above the narthex where he and the white bear entered the castle, is a room filled with couches and comfortable cushions. The walls are lined with large paintings with friendly, vague interpretations of what Yuuri can only discern to be scenes from some foreign folklore. Strange creatures unlike any _yokai_ he is familiar with pantomime in the frames, their feet large, their skin oddly ridged. 

Unlike the narthex, this particular room opens up further, with a small portion jutting out of the face of the mountain. Intrigued, Yuuri investigates and finds this section has tall thin windows built at intervals. He’s thrilled at the prospect of being able to see the outdoors, and almost instantly crushed when he realizes the vantage point shows only the gray, churning sea that is distantly met with the gray, overcast sky. Still, he is relieved to be able to see even a portion of the outdoors. It’s grounding, and the natural light is good for looking through books. 

The room to the right of the dining hall is but far his favorite. Somehow the castle must have changed to his interests, because the room holds a massive indoor ice rink, the likes of which he would have never thought possible. Several pairs of skates line the walls, all but one perfectly his size. A slightly larger pair of skates with unusual golden blades rest alone on a shelf of their own. 

Yuuri hasn't skated in years, though he had often done so on the local pond when it froze over. He and his childhood friends Nishigori and Yuuko would share a single pair of ill-fitting skates and try to skate circles around the pond. They always made plans to save up for a pair of skates for each of them.

Then the harvests started to go bad, and soon both of his friends had been forced to move away with their families, seeking a better life in a different village.

Now, Yuuri is surrounded by more luxury than he could have ever imagined, and he wishes he could see that his family had been rewarded with the same. 

Though he has no concept of the passage of time in the castle aside from the nightly shutting off of the lights, Yuuri has been trying to keep a somewhat regular eating schedule. The banquet hall will provide him food the moment he sits down, regardless of the hour. Before his family fell on hard times, he tended to gain weight easily, something he wished to avoid if he wanted to relearn ice skating. 

Finding his aimless wandering had left him in the banquet hall, Yuuri caves and takes a seat at the table. After struggling for a full meal for so long, it wouldn’t hurt to indulge. 

He keeps a meticulous count of how many days he’s been in the castle, inscribing marks on the inside cover of a book of dog illustrations. Keeping a tally makes the castle feel a bit like a prison. _Though rationally, that’s all it is_ , he shakes off the thought. A week passes and he realizes he has not seen the white bear again. Every day he did a cursory search for the bear, checking rooms he didn’t usually frequent, peeking through closets and between bookshelves. For some reason, he was under the impression that going with the bear meant they would be living together in the castle, odd as the arrangement sounded. 

Yuuri barely knew the white bear, but being alone in the castle was lonely. 

The bear seemed lonely, too. 

He pushes these thoughts aside, continues to mark the days, and search for the bear every morning. Instead, he changes pace and gives ice skating a try. 

The first hour or so, even with a smooth rink and proper skates, is disastrous. Yuuri is off balance, barely knows how to stop, and tends to fall if he tries to skate with any speed. Or if he tries to turn. Or if the pick at the tip of the skate catches. 

For the first time, Yuuri is acutely grateful that the castle is adjusts to his needs; if he can make the trudge up to the third floor on his bruised elbows and knees, a full indoor bath awaits to soothe his ails. 

Yuuri picks himself up off the ice after another fall, steadying himself with one hand on the side rail. He nearly falls again when he looks across the rink, noting with a jolt that the white bear is watching him. Sitting almost primly behind the side rail, its eerie bright eyes staring at him. 

“H-hey?” Yuuri greets, out of breath, “you’re back?”

The instant the bear is noticed, it scrambles to its feet and begins to walk away. 

“Wait! Don’t go -” Yuuri skates across the rink after him, picking up admirable speed before the pick of his left shoe catches the ice and he flops forward. He lays winded for long minutes on the ice before he can wheeze in enough air to properly assess the state of his limbs. Nothing broken, everything in need of a long soak. Yuuri props himself up on his forearms and peers wildly around the rink, searching for the white bear, conspicuously absent. 

“Some help you are,” he grumbles, maybe slightly embarrassed by how he’d reacted in seeing the bear after so long. 

Like a responsible magic-castle-prisoner, he hangs his favored pair of skates up, and trudges up to the bath house, soaking in a piping hot bath, scented with something pleasantly relaxing. 

By the time he feels like a human being again (a rather pruny human being), Yuuri heads back to the room overlooking the ocean, noting that the perpetually cloudy sky is dimming, indicating the late afternoon. He still has a few hours before the lights shut off. 

As much as he would like to search for the white bear, Yuuri is still off put by its quick retreat upon seeing him, plus he is much too sore to do a full trek through the castle. He pulls one of the softest couches to the center of the room so it can be in full view of the windows and the waning daylight. Fortunately, the castle doesn’t reset the furniture every night, which would be a bit too uncanny, even for Yuuri. In the process of pulling the couch, one leg catches on a corner of the plush rug filling the center of the room, folding it over. Sighing, Yuuri walks over to push it back into place, pausing when a ray of the dimming outdoor light catches on something shiny. 

The glint is deep in a crevice of one of the floor’s heavy wooden beams. Yuuri tries to reach it with his hand, but eventually has to extract the object with a compass from the library. 

It springs free, clattering on the wood and coming to a rolling stop against the fringed edge of the rug. 

Yuuri picks the item up with interest. A single gold ring, just a simple band with something inscribed on the inside of it, flanked by snowflakes on either side. He rolls it between his index finger and thumb before caving to curiosity and sliding it onto his ring finger. It’s a perfect fit. 

Wearing a stranger’s ring feels uncomfortable. He removes it and takes another look at the inscription: 

Виктор

The language is unfamiliar, though it looks similar to the text in many of the books in the library. Yuuri pockets the ring, adjusts the rug, and drags the couch back to its original position, as though covering up his discovery. He makes a quick stop to the weaving room beside the library and searches until he finds a length of heavy silk cord, sliding the ring on and hanging it around his neck. 

A thousand questions fill his mind as he returns to the lounge to watch the last bits of gray light disappear over the horizon. Everything else in the castle seemed upfront, eagerly presented to him for his comfort. This was different. 

The ring feels like a secret, like something he wasn’t meant to find. He holds it tight in his hand, peering around. 

Of course, he is alone. 

Though sometimes it felt as though the castle had eyes, it was a magical, practically living place. 

For the first time, the paintings on the walls do not feel friendly, the ridged-skinned beings glare down at him. 

Minako had spoken of ice trolls.

When Yuuri looks back at the paintings, it’s all he can see now. 

_Huldra._

__

Despite the unease creeping in the corners of his mind, Yuuri’s discomfort is overridden by the amount of energy he’d spent ice skating earlier in the day. He eats more than he ever has at the enchanted table: a reddish soup followed by a creamy potato and egg based salad, with a main course of beef, onion, and mushroom covered in a creamy sauce and served over a wide flat noodle. Following dinner, he doesn’t wait for the lights to dim, drags his aching limbs up the stairs, and face plants into his bed. Yuuri is asleep in moments. 

In the days that follow, Yuuri takes relearning ice skating at a sane pace, and finds that he can improve steadily without working himself to the limit. When not skating, Yuuri finally works up the courage to start experimenting with the weaving room. His knowledge of the craft extends to kumihimo, and not much farther. However, the large loom in the room seems to have a similar principle and he quickly picks it up. He makes several swaths of fabric in various colors and materials, experimenting with the threads he likes best. The more practical, silk threads are easier to manipulate, though he is drawn to the fine, shimmery threads that yield sheer, almost ethereal fabrics. 

Somewhere in Yuuri’s newfound routine of training, weaving, and the occasional reading, he begins to notice something strange in his room. In his haste to explore the castle, he tended to jump out of bed, get dressed, and not give the room a single thought. Now that the newness of the castle has worn down, Yuuri notices one morning with a start that the pillow on the opposite side is rumpled, the covers too are displaced. His vision shakes for a moment and he’s lightheaded, reaching over to inspect the bed. He doesn’t toss and turn, he has no recollection of rolling onto this side of the bed. Smoothing over the pillow pulls up a single, condemning piece of evidence: a long silver hair. 

Yuuri drops it as though it is on fire and stumbles from his room, nearly taking a tumble down the stairs. Someone - or some _thing_ \- has been in his bed with him, probably more than once. 

Panic threatens to overwhelm him as he sits in the banquet hall, the table producing him a single bowl of beet-root soup that he pushes around with his spoon, takes two sips, and decides he’s too ill to eat. Yuuri spends the rest of the day jumping at shadows and sounds, too scared even to ice skate. What if he turns around and sees the silver-haired creature watching him? He desperately wishes the white bear would turn up, a comforting, familiar face. Maybe it could explain the hair. If there was another prisoner in the castle, the least it could have done was inform him. 

By dinner, Yuuri is so hungry from skipping breakfast and lunch that he over stuffs himself on small, meat and potato filled dumplings and is nearly ill. 

He waits until the lights are nearly out before he treks up the spiral staircase, oil lamps flicking out behind him. He has never tried to stay out past lights out, and at this point, he’s too afraid to try. Hands shaking, he changes into his nightshift and lies on his side of the bed stiff as a board, arms tight to his sides. He stares at the ceiling, breath coming fast and shallow. It could have been minutes, or nearly an hour, but sure enough after all the lights were out, Yuuri hears the floor creak. 

He wants to scream, but he can’t. This is a nightmare, a waking nightmare. What can he do? Even if his door is unlocked, who knows what horrors might await him in the dark castle after dark, and he doesn’t know how to escape to the outside world anyways. 

The bed dips to his right, and he lets out an involuntary squeak. There is a pause, followed by shuffling of bedding, before whatever is beside him falls silent, save for quiet breathing. 

Yuuri is too paralyzed to move. He stays completely still, heart pounding, until his body finally tires of the panic and drops him into a fitful sleep. 

By morning the stranger is gone, leaving only the tell-tale silver hairs. Yuuri feels physically ill, and normally he would stay in bed all day to cope, but now his bedroom doesn’t feel safe. 

When the White bear appears in the afternoon, he nearly cries in relief. Yuuri rushes over to the creature, who unexpectedly backs away from him. 

“I’m so glad you’re back!” He gushes, “I think there’s someone else in the castle besides me...can you...is there?” He finishes weakly, desperate for reassurance. 

The bear looks at him impassively, it’s blue eyes blank and confused. 

“You...can still talk, can you?” Yuuri feels a different panic well in his throat. 

It makes a low sound, and pads by him gingerly. 

“White bear?” He calls after the creature, stumbling after it. 

His foot catches on the corner of a rug and he trips to his knees. Wincing, Yuuri stands, noticing that the white bear has paused, turning to look at him in his disastrous state. 

“Sorry,” Yuuri mumbles, unsure why he’s apologizing. He’s the one who is tripping over rugs and without anyone to talk to and has been sharing a bed with a stranger.

The bear shuffles forward, ears perked with interest, until it is mere inches away from Yuuri. He holds up his hands, put off by the bear’s sheer size and sudden proximity. It nudges Yuuri’s chest with a curious snout, and he notices that when he’d fallen, the ring on its cord had come untucked from the front of his shirt. Now the white bear sniffs it with interest. 

Embarrassed, and still uncertain of the ring, Yuuri stuffs it back into his shirt mumbling, “This is nothing, um, it’s mine…”

Snorting abruptly, the bear raises its head, and for a moment the eyes have a human-like light behind them. 

Then the bear is turning around, lumbering away again. 

Yuuri sighs, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. The bear managed to divert his impending dread of going back to his bedroom for a brief minute, but its strange behavior has Yuuri’s mind spinning with more questions. 

Inevitably, the day comes to a close. Yuuri spends the last minutes of it pushing around pieces of noodle covered in a creamy sauce without eating much of it. He slogs up the stairs, dread digging an ever deeper pit in his stomach, discomfort prying under his skin like a thousand tiny knives. As he changes into his nightshirt, he’s light headed, stumbling over to the bed and under the covers as the lights finally dim out. 

He fists the edge of the quilt until his knuckles are surely white. The floor doesn’t creak this time, and when the bed dips it’s almost gingerly. Whomever is beside him barely moves after the initial pulling back of the covers, as though were trying to be careful. 

Again, exhaustion manages to overcome Yuuri, despite his best efforts, and he drifts off. 

Sometime, in the middle of the night, he awakes because the bed is shaking. It takes a few moments to shake off the bleary clutches of sleep to realize it’s not the bed, but his mystery bedfellow. It shivers miserably, despite the heavy quilt. 

This pattern repeats for the next handful of days: ginger steps, pitiful shivering. 

In the morning after the fifth night of this, Yuuri’s numbing fear has been reduced to a buzzing discomfort. The creature beside him has never once moved to harm, or even get close, to Yuuri, and on top of that, its pitiful shivering seems to unlock a strangely protective instinct. 

Yuuri goes to the weaving room for the first time in days. He seeks the softest, thickest yarn, something spun from a mix of sheep wool and something else. Working swiftly, he begins to make a large sheet of cloth from the yarn, weaving it tight and warm. 

He works tirelessly for the next few days, turning the sheet of fabric into a large, formless robe, the kind guests wore at the hot springs. 

Occasionally, the white bear has come in to watch him work. Yuuri doesn’t try to interact, though he wants to. The bear seems to eye him warily, and it won’t - or maybe can’t - speak anymore. 

With the finished robe in hand, Yuuri does his daily, dutiful climb of the spiral stairs. He leaves the robe folded on the opposite side of the bed, hoping that the creature would find it easily there. 

Sure enough, when darkness falls, he hears familiar footsteps, followed by the shaking out of heavy cloth. The creature arranges itself under the covers and sighs, long and low. Yuuri is startled, but his robe seems to have done the trick: the being beside him does not shiver once. Besides that, its sigh had been undeniably human. 

It becomes a routine, the stranger would leave the white robe in a heap on the bed in the morning, Yuuri folded it, and left it on top of the covers. Once a week, he would take the robe and his other clothes and wash them. 

Yuuri may not spend each night in crippling terror that some malicious nightmare being lay beside him, but he’s apprehensive. Based on the decor of the castle, he has a horrible suspicion that the creature in his bed is one of the _Huldra._ What an ice troll would want from him, he has no idea.

The nagging need to know erodes at him each day as he goes through his routines. He ice skates frequently again, managing small jumps and some more creative step patterns. In the weaving room, his experiments with fine threads have produced several large sheet of fabric. Yuuri begins crafting three separate garments, finding additional shimmering, and glittering embellishments to add to them. It all feels too extravagant, possibly a little ridiculous, to be making such outfits. 

Although, if he is meant to be a pseudo prisoner in the castle for the rest of his life, he should be allowed to dress nicely, if he so chooses. Yuuri has been keeping a dutiful tally of his days in the castle, and he soon realizes he has been at the castle for nearly half a year. Disappointment strikes him, not that he has anything to complain about, the castle provides for him wholly, save for the stranger each night. When he agreed to travel with the white bear, he had hoped it would be to see strange and wonderful places across the world, unlike any he would be able to travel to on his own. Instead he traded the small, isolated world of Hatsetsu for another small, isolated world in the castle, alone without his family. Though comfortable, it is a far cry from the adventures to the ends of the earth he had envisioned. 

Yuuri’s main source of comfort is that at least his sacrifice brought prosperity to the rest of his family. 

He replaces the book where he keeps his daily tally on the shelf and seeks out a different volume. Thus far, his favorite book is one with beautiful, full colored illustrations of different dogs. It is written in a foreign language, the same as the one inscribed on the inside of the ring Yuuri still wears dutifully around his neck. He can enjoy the illustrations all the same, especially the ones of the tall, leggy dogs with pointed, delicate snouts and curly fur. They have bright, intelligent eyes and happy smiling faces. 

He marks the page for reference, and nearly drops the book when he looks up. The white bear is sitting across from him in a peculiar manner, front paws folded primly in front of it, posture slumped, with hind legs poking out in opposite directions. It reminds Yuuri of how a portly older man might sit, and he laughs inadvertently. The bear snorts, ears flattening against its skull. 

“Wait”, Yuuri holds up the book hopefully, “let me show you this dog?”

Tentatively, he takes a seat next to the bear, who watches him cautiously the whole time. Yuuri mirrors its posture which earns him a curious look from the bear. 

“This is my favorite dog,” Yuuri holds up the book with the page of curly-haired dogs. 

The bear tilts its head downward, looking curiously at the book. 

“I’ve never had a pet dog before,” he explains, tracing around the outline of the dog as he does, “my family would have cats, to catch mice around the hot springs, but never a dog.” 

The bear makes a low grumbling noise, still looking curiously at Yuuri and the book. The light is back in its eyes, returning the human intelligence from when it had appeared at the front gate of the hot springs. 

Yuuri closes the book at last, sighing, “I always wanted a dog, like the one in the book. The only dogs in Hatsetsu were usually mixed breed, part wild dog, and really only good for hunters.” He rises slowly to his feet, mindful of the bear. It’s still strange to him, to be talking to a bear, especially now that it doesn’t seem to be able to talk back. 

The bear rolls forward into a standing position, and Yuuri hopes for a fleeting moment that it will follow him out of the library, and keep him company. 

It doesn’t. Yuuri settles in the weaving room in front of his cloth and begins pinning the fabric to a pattern he’s drafted. He’ll make two garments based loosely off of drawings he found in books from the library, and for the third he’s drawn a custom design of his own imagining. 

He works on the first garment by the light from the windows until the sun begins to set, cutting out pieces and pinning them together. He’ll need a full day to complete the sewing, and another for embellishments. 

Yuuri retires to dinner, already missing the white bear after their brief encounter. As night approaches, the apprehension of sleeping beside a stranger returns. He wishes he could glimpse them, just for a moment. 

Even after searching the castle top to bottom, Yuuri has not been able to find a single candle, lamp, or a means to light a fire. The oil lamps on the walls are out of reach and well mounted, and Yuuri doubts that even if he had a candle that it would stay lit when the rest of the castle went dark. 

Which left him a different option for learning more about the stranger: he would need to talk to them. 

So Yuuri steels himself. He waits for the telltale entrance of the stranger, waits for the shuffling and arranging of covers to cease, and finally speaks:

“Who’s there?”

There is a long pause that leaves Yuuri doubting his sanity.

“Что?”

He freezes. The voice is deep enough to belong to a male, though Yuuri missed what exactly he said. 

“Hello?”

The voice repeats himself, and Yuuri realizes to his dismay that the voice is speaking a language he cannot understand. Of course, being able to understand one another was a long shot. The castle is far away from Hatsetsu, and he has no way of knowing where the stranger may have been taken from. 

While Yuuri reels, the man has been speaking, voice quiet and curious. A stream of words pour from his mouth, as though he has not had anyone to speak to in ages. 

Yuuri turns on his side, facing the stranger, though he can’t see anything through the inky darkness. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t understand you,” he says, his hand curling into a fist, resting on the pillow beside his head. . 

The man stops speaking. He must shuffle closer, because the next handful of phrases feel closer. Yuuri mulls over what to do about communicating with the unseen man when he startles as something brushes his fisted hand. 

The fingertips are cold, ghosting lightly over Yuuri’s skin before withdrawing. Yuuri sucks in a deep breath, he has to know if this man is human. He slides his open hand in the space between them, palm up, and waits. 

A moment later, the man’s hand bumps awkwardly against his, rearranging itself so their hands rest intertwined. 

Human. He is undeniably human, skin smooth and unmarred by the rough ridges characteristic of the _Huldra_. Yuuri feels weeks of discomfort and fear lift from his shoulders. 

Their fingers are laced together, and it’s a gesture that Yuuri might initially have considered too intimate, for a person he does not know, who he can’t even see. 

Yet, he doesn’t mind, after months of being the only human, having this small amount of contact is comforting. He doesn’t want it to end, and it occurs to him at last that maybe the strange man has been just as lonely as he has the whole time.

Uncertain of what to do, now that he has confirmed his unseen bedfellow is not in fact a troll, Yuuri gives the hand a squeeze. 

“I’m Yuuri.”

The man mimics the sounds he makes exactly and Yuuri laughs softly. 

“Yuuri,” he repeats, squeezing the hand again. 

“Yuuri,” the man echoes. He begins to pull Yuuri’s hand closer to him, turning it over so he can press Yuuri’s palm against his cheek. 

The contact of skin alone is enough to send a jolt through Yuuri, without considering the way the stranger leans into his palm, the small sigh of relief he makes. 

“Yuuri,” the man repeats, pressing a kiss to the inside of Yuuri’s wrist. 

It’s too much, the honest intimacy of the gesture, compounded with the way he lilts over the r’s of his name, as though the mere sound were something precious. Yuuri yanks his hand away, the shock of the stranger’s kiss sending a burning sensation that begins in his chest and ends somewhere deep in his stomach. 

He rolls onto his back, clutching his hands to his chest, breath coming in uncharacteristically short. 

“Yuuri?” The man calls out, plaintively. He can feel something tug at the edge of his pillowcase, keeping a respectful distance. 

Yuuri wishes so badly to just be able to talk to the stranger, tell him “I’m sorry, I don’t want to push you away, I’m just scared.”

He reaches out a hand again, curling it over the stranger’s hand, and simply letting it rest in between the two of them. The man lets out a relieved sigh, re-lacing their fingers together. Yuuri falls asleep holding the stranger’s hand. 

In the morning, his arm is still outstretched, but the stranger is gone, leaving long silver hairs behind. 

It becomes a routine, Yuuri lays an open hand on the bed each night. When the strange man arrives, he bundles under the covers and takes Yuuri’s hand, usually accompanied by repeating Yuuri’s name several times, delighted. 

Yuuri wishes the stranger would offer up his name, but after a few nights it occurs to him that perhaps the man has forgotten his own name, just as the white bear had. 

The white bear appears sporadically, usually in the weaving room or the ice rink. Yuuri wishes it would go to the indoor bath house sometime, the image of a massive bear sitting in one of the tubs is an amusing thought. Though more than likely, the room is too warm for the bear. 

It watches Yuuri in companionable silence as he’s sewing the last of the jewels on his final costume. The design is sleek, with angular jewel patterns across the front and back, the shirt flowing seamlessly into the pants, embellished on the side by a half skirt.

“Do you like it?” Yuuri asks, hanging up the finished garment.

The bear snorts in approval, seemingly dazzled by the shining fabric. 

Yuuri folds up the three completed garments and wraps them up in some plain cloth. He’ll bring them to his closet later in the day. For the rest of the afternoon, he practices skating, landing most of the small jumps he can do, and successfully skating backwards and forwards with ease. He feels stronger than he has in months. 

As he lies awake besides the strange man, Yuuri babbles about his day, and the man responds in his own language. They’ve started doing this, taking turns talking even though they can’t understand one another. It’s a little frustrating, but Yuuri likes having the chance to talk to another human. 

“Yuuri?” He asks, and Yuuri is uncertain what he means, until the stranger’s fingers brush against his jaw. 

He freezes, mind turning blank as it stalls between fleeing and staying perfectly still. 

The stranger’s hand moves downward, tracing his collarbone, just under the top hem of his night clothes, until it bumps into the silk cord that holds the mystery ring. Almost eagerly, the stranger tugs the cord, freeing the ring from where it was tucked inside Yuuri’s clothes. 

He picks up the ring, still attached, and rolls it between his fingers. Yuuri finally comes to his senses enough to make a sound of surprise. Every rational instinct wants him to pull away, but a curious streak keeps him spellbound, wondering what the man will do next. He brings his hands up next to the stranger’s, and feels as he slides the ring onto his own finger. 

“This is your ring,” Yuuri breathes with surety. 

The stranger mumbles something, removes the ring, and presses it back against Yuuri’s chest. 

Perplexed, Yuuri spins the ring around a few times. How did the man know he had the ring? 

He always kept it tucked under his clothes, and besides his room was always pitch black at night. The only other being that had seen Yuuri with the ring…

...Was the white bear. 

“Yuuri~” the man tugs at the side of his pillowcase, needy and eager. 

Glad the man can’t see him roll his eyes, Yuuri reaches a hand out, one that is quickly snatched by the silver-haired stranger. 

He falls asleep, head spinning with questions. The man in his bed was also the white bear. 

How long had he been a bear? Was he a bear first and a person second or the other way around? Why did he only become a person a night? Why wasn’t Yuuri allowed to look at him? Does he know he is undergoing this transformation every day? Sometimes the bear had seemed painfully human, and now he understood why. 

Yet other times the bear had been impassive, terrifying like a wild animal. 

Yuuri seeks out the bear the next day. He isn’t hard to find, lurking around the ice rink, snuffling at the pair of gold-bladed skates with interest. 

“Those are yours, aren’t they?” Yuuri asks, stopping a few feet away from the bear. 

The bear looks at him strangely, jumping slightly as Yuuri reaches out to ruffle the fur atop its head. It always had a silvery sheen, the fur. Yuuri can’t believe he didn’t make the connection sooner. 

“You’re him, right?” He doesn’t expect the bear to speak, not after months of silence, “somehow you’re a bear by day, and a human by night?” Yuuri smooths a hand over the bear’s head, “how did this happen to you?”

He jolts when the bear growls, low and feral. His eyes roll back at him, cold and emotionless. Yuuri stumbles away backwards, tripping and falling hard on his behind, continuing to scramble away from the bear. 

He growls again, guttural and angry, sniffing the air as though searching for prey. So caught up in the euphoria of realizing the identity of the bear and the stranger, he forgot the bear was still a wild creature, cursed beyond recognition. 

Slowly losing his humanity. 

Yuuri scurries out of the ice arena and isn’t followed. A sense of resolve blooms in his chest: he needs to break the curse on the bear, whatever it took. 

When Yuuri goes to bed, he’s apprehensive. How is he supposed to act around the stranger, with the image of the white bear, tensed for the hunt, snarling at Yuuri without a trace of light in his eyes, so fresh in his mind? 

How would the stranger react? Would he be ashamed or nervous?

Yuuri is greeted with the lilting sound of his own name as the stranger eagerly crawled into bed beside him. Evidently, not sorry at all. His mood sours a bit, especially when the stranger reaches blindly for his hand to hold. Yuuri wants to pull it away, but he tries to rationalize, in so much as he can concerning a man cursed to be a bear. Perhaps being the bear dulled his human senses, perhaps the curse had different rules for the man in bear and human form. After all, the white bear could speak in a language Yuuri understood at one point, and the human man couldn’t speak his language at all. 

While Yuuri isn’t paying attention, the man has pressed his palm against his cheek, something he hasn’t done since the first time they touched, considering Yuuri’s reaction. Now, he’s curious. Hesitantly, Yuuri traces his thumb over the stranger’s high, angular cheekbones, earning him a quiet, contented sigh. 

Emboldened, Yuuri traces the shape of his nose, long and straight, his high forehead and arching eyebrows, ghosting fingertips over his eyelids. The stranger’s eyelashes are long, he wonders if they are silver as his hair. 

Feeling self-conscious, Yuuri continues his exploration, tracing the pad of his thumb over full lips that upturn to a smile as he does. A kiss is pressed against his fingertips, and Yuuri quickly moves to safer territory, outlining the man’s sharp chin and angled jaw, hesitating when he reaches his hairline. The man leans into Yuuri’s touch, his chest feels tight but not in an unpleasant way. More curious than scared, Yuuri runs his fingers through the man’s long, silky hair, earning another pleased sigh. For the first time, he’s grateful for the darkness, so the stranger can’t see his flushed cheeks. 

Until the man reaches forward and gently cups Yuuri’s jaw in his palm. His hands are larger than Yuuri’s, soft and uncalloused. He mirror’s Yuuri’s exploration, tracing over his features with a sort of innocent reverence. Those graceful hands stroke his hair, much longer now than it had been when he left home. Unbidden, Yuuri makes a soft, content sound. The man shifts forward, until their foreheads barely touch. His heart is racing now, uncertain of what any of this means, the want to know and understand one another, the comfort derived from simple touch. He tries not to overthink it, and never once thinks of pulling away. 

The man takes ahold of Yuuri’s free hand, the other rests comfortably tangled in his long hair, resting in the crook of his neck and shoulder. 

“Victor” he says, squeezing Yuuri’s hand empathetically. 

“What?” Yuuri is confused as the man pulls his captured hand closer to him. 

He presses Yuuri’s open palm against his chest, pressing into the soft fabric of the robe, overtop his heart. His other hand rests against Yuuri’s cheek, thumb caressing his cheekbone. 

“меня зовут _Victor_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ Polar bears sit like people it's CUTE ](http://goodnature.nathab.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/4-IMG_6995_Web.jpg)
> 
> The three garments Yuuri makes are his [ free skate ](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CziVokUVQAA2Reg.jpg), [ Phantom of the Opera ](https://66.media.tumblr.com/451adaaeb593f758f5dd9dd07776a5ed/tumblr_pesijezsUV1w72cuso1_1280.jpg), and [ Eros](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VqrMIWakL._AC_UY606_.jpg)


End file.
